Abstract
Wavefront correction, or more generally control, of high power laser beams is becoming more and more crucial since applications require often the highest intensities associated to the smallest focal spot, and more recently ask for programmable intensity profiles. When dealing with high energy and intense lasers, thermal effects make usually the beam so aberrated that the Airy pattern is split into several hot spots, with typically peak intensities of the same order of magnitude (see Fig. 1 -left). Moreover the spot location can change for shot to shot. In our case of Nd-Glass amplifiers this is due to air disturbance in the propagation, room temperature and flashlamp fluctuations: after twenty minutes delay, which is the usual repetition rate of our glass chain, the probability that two shots see the same environmental conditions is null.
© 2002 Optical Society of America
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